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Full catalog/SNEX23_Lidar
SNEX23_Lidar·v1·dataset

Snow depth and tree height from aircraft laser (SnowEx 2023)

SnowEx23 Airborne Lidar-Derived 0.5M Snow Depth and Canopy Height V001
land NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 2A GeoTIFF
In plain English

What it measures. Fine-scale maps of snow depth and tree (canopy) height, plus the shape of the bare ground beneath, at half-meter resolution across two Alaska study areas — a boreal forest and coastal tundra.

How it's made. Created from a scanning laser flown on a small Cessna aircraft during NASA's SnowEx 2023 field campaign, with the snow and canopy values calculated from the raw laser terrain models.

How & where you'd use it. Helps researchers measure how much snow sits on the landscape and how forests are structured, important for water supply and Arctic ecosystem studies.

What's measured

LAND SURFACE › TOPOGRAPHY › TERRAIN ELEVATION › DIGITAL ELEVATION/TERRAIN MODEL (DEM)CRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › SNOW DEPTHBIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › CANOPY CHARACTERISTICS › VEGETATION HEIGHT

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2022-03-11 → 2023-10-25
  • Measured byCESSNA 206 (Riegl Airborne Lidar)
  • Processing levelLevel 2A
  • Spatial extent-148.5, 64.5, -148, 70
  • FormatsGeoTIFF
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

This data set provides digital terrain models, snow depth, and canopy height, acquired by a scanning lidar system and derived from Point Cloud Digital Terrain Models (PCDTMs) from two regions of Alaska, USA collected as part of the NASA SnowEx 2023 field campaign. The study sites include a boreal forest environment in the Fairbanks region of central Alaska (the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest, Caribou Poker Creek watershed, and Farmer’s Loop/Creamer’s Field) and a coastal tundra environment in the North Slope region of the northern Alaska coastal plain (Arctic coastal plain and Upper Kuparuk Toolik). The raw data from which these data are derived are available as <a href="https://nsidc.org/data/SNEX23_Lidar_Raw">SnowEx23 Airborne Lidar Scans Raw, Version 1</a>.

Get the data

snex23_lidar_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="SNEX23_Lidar",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.